All the Unicorns, One Location

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Sometimes the phone rings and it’s that phone call no one ever wants. That happened to me last week, when my house sitter called to ask where the main water shutoff valve was. No one wants to answer that question from just outside Glacier National Park at 11 pm. For the record, the family and the pets are all fine, the disaster recovery company is amazing, and there’s an “unanticipated” opportunity for re-cabling and remodeling.

And sometimes the phone rings, and it’s that one offer you can’t refuse–not just a line in a movie. After an amazing ride with SolidFire through acquisition by NetApp, it is time to take on a new challenge. Another unanticipated opportunity to build something new.

Starting today, I’ll be Director of Influence Marketing for VMware’s NSX BU. I’m looking forward to working with customers, building community, and connecting all of those people/platform/content dots. Another case of playing my position no matter where I am on the field, and working with some of my mentors and a talented team.

None of this would be possible without a lot of support from colleagues, mentors, and extended community. Thank you one and all for making this last two years the most exciting and productive of my professional life. And thank you to my Geek Whisperers and Speaking in Tech crews, and of course my own personal Snuffleupagus for walking through change first and showing us all how it’s done.

I subscribe to the “until next time” model–so to all my colleagues at NetApp, I’ll see you at VMworld, just with a different colored lanyard. To the vcommunity I’ve worked alongside for so long, I look forward to digging in and working with you officially.

#GameOn

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This past week, after one more flight across the country, I had the opportunity to take my youngest (better known as POTUS2040) to soccer practice. Yes, I’m a soccer mom. She plays club level, and we live in Chapel Hill, launching pad of Mia Hamm. So women’s soccer is not an afterthought here, it’s the main event.

I watch a lot of soccer (I call it football typically, but for ease of translation, I’ll say soccer). I’m a coach, I took the game up in my 30s, and I admire the worth ethic involved in getting good at it.

Back to the story at hand. At this practice they were scrimmaging, small goals, not a full 11-a-side, and no goalkeepers. POTUS2040 is in the process of choosing between being a full-time goalkeeper and a field player. She’s 10 years old, and while that may seem young, we are at the point where she wants to decide and train accordingly, because on the surface, the skills are very different.

During this practice, I noticed she was playing what I would call a “number 10” role–center midfielder, distributing passes left right and center to her teammates. They won handily against a strong side. After practice, I commented on how she seemed to always be in the right place to pass, but never moved to score. She laughed and told me, “yeah, I basically decided to be a goalie in the middle of the field. I knew where the ball would be and I passed it.”

POTUS2040, age 10, saw what I didn’t. She played her position of choice, played to her strengths. She has to be accurate in her passes in the goal, or she’ll be dealing with an opponent coming right back at her in the goal. She is practicing her craft, no matter what the drill called for at the moment.

She had a great time. She laughed and loved the beautiful game. Her team won.

And I got the memo: play to your strengths, no matter where you are on the field. If you’re technical, but work in the marketing org, don’t shy away from it. If you write well, but you’re in marketing and not comms, find a way to document what you do. If you are comfortable asking questions and naturally curious, podcast.

Goalies don’t often play in the midfield, but when they do, they know where the ball will be, and where to direct it. Play to your strengths.

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It’s that time of year again: time for resolutions. I’m a fan of the exercise, even if this makes approximately the fifth year in a row I’ve resolved to do a single pull-up without succeeding. The process of deciding what matters and the struggle to achieve something new is worth it.

To that end, I have many job counseling sessions with colleagues across the industry who want to make a change, who feel stuck, who are frustrated at the plateau they’ve reached. We have the pleasure of hearing success stories on the Geek Whisperers podcast every week, but we get to hear the journey stories as well, the questioning, the doubt.

So here is some free and unsolicited advice I received during my first career pivot, maternity leave. My boss at the time (a father of four), understood what I did not—my life was getting ready to change dramatically and it was an opportunity.

Here’s the secret: Decide on a task to put down and don’t pick it back up upon return.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, rewritten in Doge

Sounds too easy, right? How could this work?

I’m a realist, so you can’t put down the pager if that’s your role, or quit expense reports in a dramatic pull the inflatable slide and jump way, but there’s something that you can put down or manage differently. What is it? What is the extra weight you’re carrying that is keeping you from going where you want to go in your career?

Will you need to pick something else up? Absolutely, but now you have a free hand to do so, and you’ve left an albatross behind.

Maternity leave forced me to do what I hadn’t been able to do on my own (twice)—let go of less important work and focus on more important and more fulfilling work. I shifted from traditional publishing (10 years of my career!) to technology after my second maternity leave, which gave me more growth opportunities and led me to work and an industry that I love.

Ask yourself what work you do that both makes you happy and serves the company you’re working for right now. It can be an uncomfortable question, full of lizard brain roadblocks about how “they’ll never let me do that.” Or “if only,” then . . .

New Year’s Resolutions are meant to challenge you. If you move incrementally closer to personal and professional happiness at work, mark that in the 2016 win column. Why wait? What’s your resolution?

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For months I’ve been meaning to sit down and craft a blog about being mentored, but my need to be mentored outpaced my ability to document the process. So big thanks to my mentors one and all for helping me transition into the new and expanding role.

As I am vocal about the value of my fleet of mentors, I’m often asked how to go about finding them.

Everyone can teach you something, and you don’t have to be formal about it. If your workplace has a formal mentoring program, by all means use it, but don’t feel like that is the only path forward.

Being mentored is far more about your state of mind than a magical bullet of wisdom.

However, there are a few guiding principles:

1. Be humble. You can’t learn if you know it all. Prepare yourself to really listen. Anyone can mentor you if you pay attention to what they have to teach.

2. Be ready for tough love. Great mentors build you up, but deliver the tough assessments and advice as well. If you want nothing but good news, seek minions or sycophants, not mentors.

3. Use the word “mentor” with respect. If you identify someone who is helping you with your life and career, honor them with the word and treat them accordingly.

4. Learn in secret. If you don’t have a formal or close relationship, or if someone you admire “doesn’t have time to mentor,” learn by watching, asking questions, and modeling your behavior. These people are still your mentors, but if the word causes distress, keep it to yourself.

5. Be prepared to work for it. Mentors are doing you a favor, acknowledge it. Taking good advice is often hard work. Duncan Epping has a great blog on the topic: “How Do I Get to the Next Level?” (It’s not all unicorns and stroopwafels!)

How do you find and honor your mentors?

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So changes are in the air. At the end of 2014, I’ll be packing up the unicorn and bacon show and heading over to SolidFire as Director of Influence Marketing. I’m excited. I’m terrified. I’m quadrupling the number of times I’ve ever been to Colorado in my life.

New year, new pairing.

First, huge thanks to the innumerable amazing colleagues and friends at Cisco, and to the tech community at large. It has been a lot of fun these last few years.

From humble beginnings, vBacon, WaffleStack, BaconIT, and many other community events grew from a few beers with friends to a tree of bacon.

From a Tower Grows a Tree!

Apparently there is such a thing as a bacon seed. I have had the privilege to get to know so many amazing technologists, to ask questions, to document, to learn.

We have come a long way.

But now it’s time to take a leap, to practice what we preach on the Geek Whisperers every week, and to challenge myself to something new.

Shhhhh, the Geeks are Whispering.

Why SolidFire? The community answered that question: great people and a great culture. I’m a fan of smart and nice. Simple words, huge impact on daily life.

Great mentors. More on that in a later post, but when I made my decision spreadsheet (and yes, I made a spreadsheet), I included a row for mentors and champions. I believe in the apprenticeship model and having a champion makes all the difference in being effective. You can’t go into battle alone.

Unicorns Beware! It’s Game Time.

New challenges. Large vendor to small start-up—yes, that should keep things interesting.

I believe you should never run from, but go to—that is certainly the case here. I’m thankful for an extremely supportive management chain in my current job at Cisco, and one of the best co-workers in the business. They will rock 2015. Congratulations to the incoming class of Cisco Champions. I’ll be watching with pride.

Community FTW! #feartheears

Lastly, another sincere thank you to the many many people who have taken the time over the last 4 years to break bacon, go on camera, shoot a ridiculous selfie, answer a serious question, share an opinion, hold a purse (#feartheears), and generally be awesome.

With that, I raise a SolidFire pint glass to you all in 2015. 😉

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These last few weeks have involved a lot of discussions around different ways to grow and be a part of community. In our content-driven marketplace, too often there’s a hierarchy of engagement that looks like this:

Passive engagement gets the pejorative “lurk” tag. Publishing content, feeding the machine, is held in the highest regard. I’ve definitely been guilty of perpetuating this myth.

In fact, I’m sort of doing that right now by breaking a vow I made to my mentor: shut up and listen.

Well perhaps he was kinder in his phrasing, the directive was stop producing and consume. Consume content like you’re starving. There are even check-ins about this, like an accountability group. My name is Amy, and it’s been 5 days since I created content.

This forced production break has been awesome, and I’m looking forward to another content consumption binge over the holidays. I’ve been reading this:

Reading Creativity, Inc makes you a unicorn.

Which made me think about this episode of Engineers Unplugged with Josh Atwell and Gurusimran Khalsa, where GS drops the mic by reminding us that being part of the community can be as simple and powerful as saying thank you or asking a question:

Which inspired me to document this:

If you would like to consume the brainstorm in shortened PPT form, I’ve posted Influence Marketing 201: Shut Up and Listen on SlideShare.

So go forth and pay some compliments, ask some questions, and consume some content! And thank you for listening.

Sometimes you pick your memes, and sometimes they pick you. So select wisely. Why do unicorns appear so often in my Twitter stream and on whiteboard worldwide?

Unicorns are rare indeed.

Let’s start with some functional definitions of a unicorn. At it’s core, it’s a mythical creature. Yes, breaking news, unicorns are NOT real. The mysticism and search for perfection is at the heart of the connotation of the word.

The tech world has long embraced the term to mean everything from a perfect but unattainable solution (e.g., a single pane of glass management solution) to a super high-functioning team member (see also, “rock star”) to the individual who possesses a heady blend of tech prowess and communications skills.

“Unicorn” can be used adjectivally (that’s a unicorn solution you’ve just proposed), but is most commonly a noun (see, “Interview with a Unicorn“).

Since I need to be working on a PPT slide and not writing this blog, I’ll let someone else hunt the first use of the term. I couldn’t find it, but feel like it was coming into prominence within the last 2 to 3 years.

Beware the dark side.

Now turn back time to the Summer of 2012 when I was developing the Engineers Unplugged concept with Brian Gracely. By developed with I mean he told me to stop being boring and produce something. We whiteboarded out the basic concepts that very afternoon.

Brian challenged me to find some connective thread through the narrative of varying tech talks, something everyone could do and that would set the tone of an otherwise serious and technical show.

Secretly, watching highly intelligent people scramble to draw a unicorn is both highly entertaining and disarming.

The unicorn challenge was born in the second episode.

I didn’t create unicorn lingo, I just borrowed it from the community I was joining. For the record, I never owned a single unicorn-themed anything as a kid. Now I have a rich variety of unicorn items and toss the word around like a native.

Punk Rock Unicorn: My Spirit Animal Phone Case

Another fun fact, in 6 seasons of shooting Engineers Unplugged, with an average of 12 episodes per season, no one has ever refused to draw a unicorn.